“The more one learns, the more he understands his ignorance.”
Louis L'Amour (1908–1988) Novelist, short story writer
Source: The Revolt of the Masses (1929), Chapter XII: The Barbarism Of "Specialisation"
“The more one learns, the more he understands his ignorance.”
Louis L'Amour (1908–1988) Novelist, short story writer
“Every time man makes a new experiment he always learns more. He cannot learn less.”
Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) American architect, systems theorist, author, designer, inventor and futurist
1960s, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1963)
Context: Every time man makes a new experiment he always learns more. He cannot learn less. He may learn that what he thought was true was not true. By the elimination of a false premise, his basic capital wealth which in his given lifetime is disembarrassed of further preoccupation with considerations of how to employ a worthless time-consuming hypothesis. Freeing his time for its more effective exploratory investment is to give man increased wealth.
Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (1888–1975) Indian philosopher and statesman who was the first Vice President and the second President of India
Eminent Indians (1947)
“A specialist is a man who knows more and more about less and less.”
William James Mayo (1861–1939) American surgeon
Speech before a gathering of physicians (circa 1922) http://books.google.com/books?id=qYIHAAAAMAAJ&q=%22a+specialist+is+a+man+who+knows+more+and+more+about+less+and+less%22&pg=PA35#v=onepage
Prevale (1983) Italian DJ and producer
Original: L'ignorante pecca spesso di educazione, arroganza e presunzione. Per lui è normale comportarsi così perché non è abituato ad acquisire cultura, secondo lui nasce saggio e generalmente per la sua natura chiusa muore sempre insieme alla sua ignoranza.
Source: prevale.net
John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America
1963, Address at Vanderbilt University
Sinclair Lewis book Arrowsmith
Arrowsmith (1925)
Context: Perhaps I am a crank, Martin. There are many who hate me. There are plots against me—oh, you t'ink I imagine it, but you shall see! I make many mistakes. But one thing I keep always pure: the religion of a scientist.
To be a scientist—it is not just a different job, so that a man should choose between being a scientist and being an explorer or a bond-salesman or a physician or a king or a farmer. It is a tangle of ver-y obscure emotions, like mysticism, or wanting to write poetry; it makes its victim all different from the good normal man. The normal man, he does not care much what he does except that he should eat and sleep and make love. But the scientist is intensely religious—he is so religious that he will not accept quarter-truths, because they are an insult to his faith.
He wants that everything should be subject to inexorable laws. He is equal opposed to the capitalists who t'ink their silly money-grabbing is a system, and to liberals who t'ink man is not a fighting animal; he takes both the American booster and the European aristocrat, and he ignores all their blithering. Ignores it! All of it! He hates the preachers who talk their fables, but he iss not too kindly to the anthropologists and historians who can only make guesses, yet they have the nerf to call themselves scientists! Oh, yes, he is a man that all nice good-natured people should naturally hate! ~ Gottlieb, Ch. 26
Louis L'Amour (1908–1988) Novelist, short story writer
Source: Education of a Wandering Man (1989), Ch. 11